Dutch Harbor, 1942: The Attack Americans Were Not Told About
Alaska
June third, nineteen forty-two. Japanese aircraft launched from the carrier force of Admiral Kakuji Kakuta came in low over Unalaska Island and bombed Dutch Harbor. Forty-three American service members and civilians died. Oil tanks burned. A wing of the Dutch Harbor Naval Air Station was destroyed.
It was the first enemy attack on the continental United States since the War of Eighteen Twelve, a framing that sets aside the Pearl Harbor attack six months earlier, since Hawaii was then a territory, not a state.
The United States government classified or minimized press coverage of the attack in the days that followed, operating on the calculation that the American public, still raw from Pearl Harbor six months earlier, would panic if they learned an enemy force had struck the North American continent. The reporters who were present had their dispatches delayed or censored.
Within weeks of the Dutch Harbor attack, Japanese forces occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska at the far western tip of the Aleutian Chain, placing enemy soldiers on American territory. They remained there for more than a year, the only occupation of United States soil during the Second World War.
The campaign to retake Attu in May nineteen forty-three cost over five hundred American dead and more than a thousand wounded in brutal close-quarters fighting across volcanic terrain in fog and sub-zero temperatures. Casualty rates per unit engaged exceeded those at Guadalcanal. In August, American and Canadian forces landed on Kiska expecting similar resistance. The island was empty. The Japanese garrison of five thousand had evacuated invisibly two weeks earlier, slipping away in fog while American ships patrolled the perimeter.
The Aleutian campaign remains the least-known theater of the Pacific War, fought at the edge of the habitable world, in weather that killed as efficiently as the enemy, against an occupation the government had tried not to publicize. Dutch Harbor today holds the Museum of the Aleutians, which tells this story in full.
